I’m continuing to level my priest in Tera, and thoroughly enjoying the process. New skill gain has slowed down now my character is level 36, but I have a fair selection of abilities. Also I think the combat difficulty has noticeably increased for average monsters in more recent areas.

Take Eldritch Academy for example. This wacky, Hallowe’en themed school is full of crazed pupils and teachers all gone bad. The corridors and rooms are much tighter than the previous ‘open dungeons’ in the game – these aren’t instances of course just open world spaces that are indoors and/or underground (dungeons and instances are often conflated terms in MMOs yet they can be different things!).

Welcome…?

One difference to previous places is the large number of spell-casters, so ranged damage dealers in groups. This makes it much harder to group them up for my customary heavy-hitting combos. It means fighting can take longer if I miss-time actions and can be a lot more painful if they manage to overlap their spells on me.

You too can have Hallowe’en every day!

The interior designs are up to the usual beautiful standard, though this place does have a certain menacing tone beyond the gaudy decorations. N.B minor spoilers in the next few screenshots!

I found the quest text in here particularly good, simple enough text but it sets a tone for the place and there are some nice little references to the willingness of adventurers to blindly follow orders!

NPCs in Tera do have personalities that come through in the quest text, sure that’s my interpretation based on the text since there’s no voice acting or cut-scenes but in my opinion the translations/localisation of the quest text is excellent given that the game is Korean in origin.